I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Trump may pull United States out of UN
Human Rights Council due to Israel Bias: The administration regards the Council
as being inherently anti-Israel which is the main reason for the consideration
for pulling out of the international body, according to the report. Politico
reported on Saturday that the Trump administration may soon back Israel on its
claim of UN bias and pull out of the organization's Human Rights Council.

According to the report, the administration is not expected to withdraw
ahead of the council’s next session that begins on Monday, but discussion of
the option has already begun and is expected to include input from Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson, ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley and President
Donald Trump.

The administration regards the Council
as being inherently anti-Israel which is the main reason for the consideration
for pulling out of the international body, according to the report. The news
site also reported that in private conversations, Secretary Tillerson has
expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the Council.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

It's official: Pentagon now calling
terror group 'ISIS'. Not Kerry’s “DAESH.” Not Obama’s “ISIL.” Not “IS.”
Pentagon has announced that the Islamic State will officially be called “ISIS”
(Islamic State Of Iraq & Syria).

In other words, references to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)
will no longer hide its “Islamic” roots as American and European leaders have
been trying to do. Thank you, General Mattis. Not Daesh. Not ISIL. Not IS.

The Pentagon has officially declared
the name of the terror group the United States and its allies have been
fighting for years is, in fact, ISIS. “We have officially switched to ISIS,”
Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a briefing with reporters
Friday. “They all mean the same thing.” Davis said ISIS already had been used
unofficially in the past inside the Pentagon because it was the “easiest to
understand.”

Saturday, February 25, 2017

There is an old training axiom that a
military force usually learns a great deal more from their defeats than from
victories on the battlefield. This has been particularly true with the U.S.
Army, which has lost many of its “first battles” during the roughly 225 years
it has served the nation. Names like First Manassas, Kasserine Pass, and Task
Force Smith are touchstones for American leaders, as they recall the U.S.
Army’s failures and defeats.

Usually, these battles remind us of the fact that the Army in the early
battles of a conflict is made up of citizen soldiers led by a cadre of
peacetime officers, not used to the fast pace, physical rigors, and mental
stress of war. The names also remind us that enemies usually attack us when
they perceive weakness and an inability to be hurt in the effort. Operation
Desert Storm was different.

The 1991 Persian Gulf War was the first
of America’s conflicts where a large, standing military force was maintained,
equipped, and trained to be ready for the early battles of a major regional
conflict. Mostly as a result of Cold War-era preparations for general war with
the Soviet Union, American forces were the best trained in the world, superbly
prepared to operate the state-of-the-art weaponry that had been supplied to
them in the 1980s.

Friday, February 24, 2017

WASHINGTON — Journalists from The New
York Times and several other news organizations were prohibited from attending
a briefing by President Trump’s press secretary on Friday, a highly unusual
breach of relations between the White House and its press corps.

Reporters from The Times, BuzzFeed News, CNN, The Los Angeles Times and
Politico were not allowed to enter the West Wing office of the press secretary,
Sean M. Spicer, for the scheduled briefing. Aides to Mr. Spicer only allowed in
reporters from a handpicked group of news organizations that, the White House
said, had been previously confirmed.

Those organizations included Breitbart
News, the One America News Network and The Washington Times, all with
conservative leanings. Journalists from ABC, CBS, The Wall Street Journal,
Bloomberg, and Fox News also attended. Reporters from Time magazine and The
Associated Press, who were set to be allowed in, chose not to attend the
briefing in protest of the White House’s actions.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

“Other battles would be more destructive than 73 Easting. Other units
would fight with the same proficiency demonstrated by Holder’s dragoons. Yet in
this first major engagement against the Republican Guard, the U.S. Army
demonstrated in a few hours the consequences of twenty years’ toil since
Vietnam.

Here could be seen, with almost flawless precision, the lethality of
modern American weapons; the hegemony offered by AirLand Battle doctrine, with
its brutal ballet of armor, artillery, and air power; and, not least, the élan
of the American soldier, who fought with a competence worthy of his forefathers
on more celebrated battlefields in more celebrated wars."

- Rick Atkinson,
Crusade

The Battle of 73 Easting was one of
many fights in Desert Storm. Each of those battles was different. Individual
and unit experiences in the same battle often vary widely. The tactics that
Army units use to fight future battles will vary considerably from those
employed in Desert Storm.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

President Donald Trump picked Army Lt.
Gen. H.R. McMaster to replace Michael Flynn as his national security adviser on
Monday. Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla. that
McMaster would replace Flynn as national security adviser.

The president touted McMaster's credentials, saying he is "a man of
tremendous talent and tremendous experience." "I watched and read a
lot over the last two days. He is highly respected by everybody in the
military, and we're very honored to have him," the president added.

McMaser called it a "privilege" to be appointed national
security adviser. "I would just like to say what a privilege it is to be
able to continue serving our nation," McMaster told reporters. "I'm
grateful to you for that opportunity, and I look forward to joining the
national security team and doing everything that I can to advance and protect
the interests of the American people."

McMaster, 54, has been regarded as
"smart, energetic, and tough" by Tom Ricks of Foreign Policy. When
McMaster was a colonel he served as an advising officer on counterinsurgency
operations in Iraq for David Petraeus, who was leading U.S. combat operations
in the country at the time.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE? Dangerous
radioactive particles have been detected across Europe and no-one knows where
they came from. Scientists baffled after detecting cancer-causing chemical
that's produced during nuclear disasters or atomic bomb blasts.

DANGEROUS radioactive particles have been detected in seven different
European countries and scientists can’t explain where they have come from. Traces
of Iodine-131 were found in Norway, Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Germany,
France and Spain in January, but the public were not immediately alerted.

The map below shows where the particles have
been detected. These radioactive particles are produced by atomic bomb
explosions or nuclear disasters such as Chernobyl or Fukushima. They appear to
be emanating from Eastern Europe, but experts have not been able to say exactly
what produced them.

Astrid Liland, head of emergency
preparedness at the Norwegian Radiation Protection Authority, told the Barents
Observer that the health risk was very low – which was why she did not raise
the alarm after detecting Iodine-131 during the second week of January. The
Iodine-131 may have leaked from nuclear reactors or medical facilities.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

In light of the recent flurry of leaks
by the so-called "deep state", which includes such agencies as the
NSA and FBI and which last week lead to the resignation of Mike Flynn after a
phone recording of his phone conversation with the Russian ambassador was
leaked to the pro-left Washington Post and other anti-Trump publications, an
article published on January 12 by the NYT has generated renewed interest.

One month ago, the NYT reported that "In its final days, the Obama
administration expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share
globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other
intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections."

The new rules significantly relax
longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by
its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by
American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions,
phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between
people abroad that cross domestic network switches.

SULAIYMANIYA, IRAQ — Islamic State
militant and a devout Muslim Amar Hussein says he reads the Koran all day in his tiny jail cell to
become a better person. He also says he raped more than 200 women from Iraqi
minorities, and shows few regrets.

Kurdish intelligence authorities gave Reuters rare access to Hussein (his
sir name is same as the middle name of Barack Obama the first Black-Muslim
president of US) and another Islamic State militant who were both captured
during an assault on the city of Kirkuk in October that killed 99 civilians and
members of the security forces. Sixty-three Islamic State militants died.

Hussein said his emirs, or local
Islamic State commanders, gave him and others a green light to rape as many
Yazidi and other women as they wanted. “Young men need this,” Hussein told
Reuters in an interview after a Kurdish counter-terrorism agent removed a black
hood from his head. “This is normal.”

Saturday, February 18, 2017

(Compilation of articles from various Canadian sources in February
2017.)

What is Really Behind Canada’s
Anti-Islamophobia Motions? A Liberal Member of Canadian Parliament (MP), Iqra
Khalid, who has strongly suggested “that terrorism carried out by Muslims ‘has
no religion,'” has tabled a second anti-Islamophobia motion in Parliament.

The motion M-103 is titled “Systemic
racism and religious discrimination,” but it specifies that Canadians must
“condemn Islamophobia and all forms of systemic racism and religious
discrimination and take note of House of Commons’ petition e-411 and the issues
raised by it.”

Petition e-411 was forwarded in June,
stating that “We, the undersigned, Citizens and residents of Canada, call upon
the House of Commons to join us in recognizing that extremist individuals do
not represent the religion of Islam, and in condemning all forms of
Islamophobia.”

Friday, February 17, 2017

Sweden’s so-called first feminist
government wears “Please Do Not Rape Us” Islamist hijabs in Iran: You can think
of the Hijab in a variety of ways.

1. There's the straight Koranic origin for making women cover up. So
they are recognized as Muslim women and Muslim men know not to rape them. “O
Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to
draw their cloaks (veils) all over their bodies that they may thus be
distinguished and not molested.” (Koran 33:59)

One Koranic commentary is quite
explicit. “It is more likely that this way they may be recognized (as pious,
free women), and may not be hurt (considered by mistake as roving slave
girls.)” The Yazidi girls captured and raped by ISIS are an example of “roving
slave girls” who can be assaulted by Muslim men.

Muslim rapists and their clerics have
utilized the "She wasn't wearing a Hijab" defense in contemporary
times in Western nations. Most notably in the Sydney gang rape case. Australia’s
Grand Mufti, the infamous Sheikh Hilaly, had said, in response to a Muslim gang
rape case, that in sexual matters, “it's 90 per cent the women's
responsibility.”

Thursday, February 16, 2017

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Geert
Wilders, the Dutch anti-Islam lawmaker who is at the vanguard of a wave of
European far-right populists aiming to take power at elections this year, is
pushing ahead with his platform to “de-Islamisize” the Netherlands, despite
lawyers saying it could breach the Dutch constitution.

In an interview Thursday with The Associated Press, Wilders insisted
that his plans, which include closing the country’s borders to asylum seekers
and migrants from Islamic countries, shutting all mosques, and banning the
Quran, are legal. And he hinted he could even seek to change the constitution,
if necessary.

Wilders says, “a constitution is not
something that is (set) in stone and can never be changed.” Wilders’ Party is
riding high in polls less than a month before parliamentary elections set for
March 15.

(Based on related articles from various Burmese sources in
February 2017.)

Lt. Colonel Aung Win Khaing (45).

On 15 February 2017 – (nearly three
weeks of news blackout after the assassination of Ko Ni in public at Rangoon International
Airport on last January-29, and after so many unconfirmed but persistent rumours
of direct involvement of third person in the hit) -- Burmese President Office has
finally released a statement on that person – (A former Lt. Colonel from
Burmese Army) – now a wanted fugitive as follows:

Appendix-2 of the press release of the President’s Office on the
shooting at Yangon International Airport

The plan to assassinate U Ko Ni, a
legal adviser for the national league for Democracy, was months in the planning
and involved a gunman hired for Ks 80 million and two brothers, one of whom is
still on the loose, according to a press release from President’s office.

The statement from the President’s
office released late yesterday on the 29 January fatal shooting of U Ko Ni
reveals a chilling murder-for-hire plot that involved intricate planning, at
least Ks100 million in cash and a gunman willing to kill.

Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Today, February 14, is Valentine’s Day,
the sacred day that intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and
affection for one another. If you’re thinking about making a study of how
couples celebrate this day, the Muslim world and the milieus of the radical
Left are not the places you should be spending your time.

Indeed, it’s pretty hard to outdo Islamists and “progressives” when it
comes to the hatred of Valentine’s Day. And this hatred is precisely the
territory on which the contemporary romance between the Left and Islamic
Supremacism is formed.

The train is never late: every year that Valentine’s comes around, the
Muslim world erupts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing everything in
their power to suffocate the festivity that comes with the celebration of
private romance. Imams around the world thunder against Valentine’s every year
— and the celebration of the day itself is literally outlawed in Islamist
states.

When former President Barack Obama said
he was “heartened” by anti-Trump protests, he was sending a message of approval
to his troops. Troops? Yes, Obama has an army of agitators — numbering more
than 30,000 — who will fight his Republican successor at every turn of his
historic presidency. And Obama will command them from a bunker less than two
miles from the White House.

In what’s shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Muslim Obama
isn’t just staying behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set
up what will effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his
threatened legacy, but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular
“America First” agenda.

He’s doing it through a network of
leftist nonprofits led by the Organizing
for Action (OFA). Normally you’d expect an organization set up to support a
politician and his agenda to close up shop after that candidate leaves office,
but not Obama’s OFA. Rather, it’s gearing up for battle, with a growing war
chest and more than 250 offices across the country.

Monday, February 13, 2017

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge
the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may
make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are
no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the
metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto.
With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

To ordinary conservative ears, this
sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that
high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. Conservative intellectuals will
insist that there has been no “end of history” and that all human outcomes are
still possible.

They will even—as Charles Kesler
does—admit that America is in “crisis.” But how great is the crisis? Can things
really be so bad if eight years of Obama can be followed by eight more of Hillary,
and yet Constitutionalist conservatives can still reasonably hope for a
restoration of our cherished ideals? Cruz in 2024!

Sunday, February 12, 2017

IN A STATEMENT PUBLISHED in its online
magazine, Dabiq, this February, the militant group the Islamic State warned
that “Muslims in the West will soon find themselves between one of two
choices.” Weeks earlier, a massacre had occurred at the Paris offices of the
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

The attack stunned French society,
while bringing to the surface already latent tensions between French Muslims
and their fellow citizens. While ISIS initially endorsed the killings on purely
religious grounds, calling the murdered cartoonists blasphemers, in Dabiq the
group offered another, more chilling rationale for its support.

The attack had “further [brought] division to the world,” the group
said, boasting that it had polarized society and “eliminated the grayzone,”
representing coexistence between religious groups. As a result, it said,
Muslims living in the West would soon no longer be welcome in their own
societies.

Treated with increasing suspicion, distrust and hostility by their
fellow citizens as a result of the deadly shooting, Western Muslims would soon
be forced to “either apostatize … or they [migrate] to the Islamic State, and
thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens,” the
group stated, while threatening of more attacks to come.

Last Friday, at roughly 9:20 p.m. local
time in Paris, the Islamic State delivered on that threat. A group of young Muslim
men pledging allegiance to the group, armed with firearms and explosives,
carried out a series of coordinated bombing and shooting attacks on civilians
in the heart of the city.

Saturday, February 11, 2017

I was about 10-years-old in the late
90s, when I was forced to go to a madrassa by my mother. I didn’t want to go. I
had heard many notorious stories about madrassas and was quite shaken at the
thought of being a part of one. Nonetheless, I was sent to become a good
Muslim.

I am a resident of Karachi and come from a conservative family where
burqas and Assalam-o-Alaikum are necessary to gain respect from your family and
friends. My mother used to emphasize on learning the Holy Quran as I grew up. When
I asked her: “Mom, why can’t I just sit at home and learn the Quran with you?” She
replied with: “There’s no better place to learn the Quran than a madrassa.”

I still remember my first day there. I
was sent to one of the biggest madrassas in Karachi. I walked in with shivering
legs. Looking around me, I found myself in a place with huge ceilings and small
rooms where children were sitting together reciting the Quran. The desks they
were using were quite weird – I have never seen anything of the like before.

Friday, February 10, 2017

The panicked emails and phone calls
began streaming in from community members at about 11 a.m. Thursday morning,
inundating Los Angeles immigration lawyers with far more cases than usual.
Immigrant advocate groups claim that more than 100 people had been taken into
custody by federal immigration officials in Southern California Thursday,
indicating a “coordinated sweep” in arrests and heightening fears that Donald
Trump’s promise to crackdown on deportations had begun to take effect.

Police and immigration officials denied the “raids” and disputed the
claim that the arrests were part of a more stringent approach, saying any
detentions were simply part of “routine” enforcement activities. But a flurry
of calls regarding arrests spurred immigration attorneys into rapid response
efforts, and prompted protests on the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

“We know the daily patterns of people
being picked up and taken,” Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition
for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, or CHIRLA, said in an interview
with The Washington Post. “There’s a natural flow of enforcement that happens
every day. But this was not normal.”

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Before Mohammad Youssduf Adulazeer shot
up a military recruiting center in Chattanooga from a car and then sped away,
another Mohammed, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad did much the same thing in 2009. Both
struck military recruiting centers in the South, but the 2009 Mohammed had a
message for Americans that we unfortunately failed to heed.

"This is not the first attack, and won't be the last,"
Muhammad warned. “I'm just one Muhammad. There are millions of Muhammads out
there. And I hope and pray the next one be more deadlier than Muhammad Atta!”

There are millions of Mohammeds out there. It took exactly six years for
one of them to finish what his predecessor started. In a world with lots of
Mohammeds, we really need to consider whether we want Mohammed becoming the
most common name for a boy in America, as it already has in countries like the
UK.

The murderous Mohammeds embody the
values of the original Mohammed, the founder of their brutal ideology. They
kill like him. They kill in his name. A country with more Mohammeds, is a
country with more Muslim terrorism.

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

What Turkish Islamists Understand about
'Education': It is customary for Turkish TV crews to interview young students
at the start of their mid-term holidays, with the cliché closing question
invariably being, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" This
year's school holiday in January was no exception. One interview, however,
produced a chilling portrait of a girl, aged just 7 or 8.

"I have big goals," she answered the interviewer. "They
will get bigger and bigger. Step by step," she said. The girl said she
wanted to start by becoming a district or village head. Then a lawmaker, a
minister, prime minister and finally the president of Turkey.

Up to this point, TV viewers must have watched her with amusement. Then
the reporter asked her: "What would you do if you became the
president?" In a calculated, tranquil tone, the girl answered: "I
would reinstate the death penalty".

She was merely one of the products of
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's ambitious social engineering project to
"raise devout generations". A proud moment in President Erdogan's
educational plans to "raise devout generations”.

Tuesday, February 7, 2017

On Jan. 30, 2017, Iran tested a new
ballistic missile, seemingly the long-range Khorramshahr. In response, the
White House announced sanctions against 25 Iranian individuals and companies.
It’s a small reaction to an extraordinary provocation that rips away the
curtain obscuring America’s foreign-policy decisions, past and present.

The past first. Sen. Bob Corker
(R-Tenn.) congratulated the White House on the sanctions, which was a little
hypocritical since he was one of the people who caused the problem in the first
place. In negotiating the secret Iran deal,
President Barack Obama took the position that it wasn’t a treaty and therefore
didn’t require Senate ratification under the Constitution. Had it been a
treaty, Obama would’ve needed two-thirds of the upper chamber’s votes — which
he wouldn’t have gotten.

Instead, Corker flipped the procedure
around with a motion to condemn the treaty, which would’ve required a
two-thirds vote to override a presidential veto. That wasn’t going to happen,
so Obama got his treaty.

Monday, February 6, 2017

The Seattle judge who temporarily
banned the White House’s refugee reform plan acted after mistakenly claiming
the federal government has not arrested jihadi migrants from the seven Muslim
countries covered by the reform.

But the federal government has arrested and jailed at least 76 people
since 2001 from the seven countries covered in the first stage of the
president’s reform, which was announced late January. That fact means there is
a huge error in the judge’s rationale for imposing a “Temporary Restraining
Order” ban on the president’s popular reform of the expensive refugee and
immigration programs.

In a hearing before the decision, Judge
James Robart told a lawyer from the Department of Justice that the federal
government has not arrested people since 2001 from any of the seven countries
named in the reform, since the 20o1 atrocity in New York. “How many arrests
have there been of foreign nationals for those seven countries since 9/11?” he
asked.

On June 16, the 193 member states of
the United Nations General Assembly unanimously approved Prince Zeid Raad Zeid
al-Hussein of Jordan as the new High Commissioner for Human Rights, charged
with spearheading the U.N.’s human rights activities.

The nomination of longtime career diplomat Ambassador Zeid has been
largely met with approval from major human rights organizations. Human Rights
Watch’s executive director Kenneth Roth tweeted that Zeid had "a strong
rights record." Suzanne Nossel, former director of Amnesty International
USA and current executive director of PEN America, also wrote a mostly positive
piece on Ambassador Zeid in Foreign Policy.

These positive reactions are based on
Ambassador Zeid’s role in advancing the International Criminal Court and
seeking to hold U.N. peacekeeping personnel accountable for sexual violence.
Diplomats from Western democracies also highlight Zeid’s Muslim and Arab
background combined with his progressive credentials as crucial for bridging
the gap between the U.N.’s Western states and Asian (particularly Islamic)
countries.

Sunday, February 5, 2017

Flynn’s plan to beat radical Islam
starts with schools and social media: President Trump’s national security
adviser wants to fight not just Islamic terrorists but the “radical ideology of
Islam,” and he plans to do it from the grass roots up, starting with our
children at schools while also using social media.

Dealing with the global Islamist threat on a tactical level through drone
strikes and arrests hasn’t worked, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn argues,
according to his largely overlooked 2016 book, “The Field of Fight: How We Can
Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.” He wants to combat it
more broadly, using informational warfare, among other things, on a scale not
seen since World War II.

But first, he writes, the government has to overcome the political taboo
of tying Islamic violence to the religion of Islam, including its sacred texts,
which he says the enemy is using as a manual of warfare.

Last week, Trump asked Flynn to work
with the Pentagon and other security agencies to draft a comprehensive plan to
not only defeat ISIS on the battlefield but “delegitimize its radical Islamist
ideology,” and have it on his desk by the end of this month.

Saturday, February 4, 2017

Burmese Muslim leader and so-called
constitutional law scholar Ko Ni was bitterly hated by Burmese Buddhist
nationalist for his relentless demands to rid the 2008 Constitution and rewrite
a new constitution guaranteeing at least ten percent of parliamentary seats for
the Muslims in Burma.

And he was killed by a lone assassin in an apparent hit on him at
Rangoon International Airport on Sunday January-29 upon his arrival back from a
so-called fact finding trip from Muslim-majority Indonesia where Muslims have managed
to wipe out most Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus.

The killer named Kyi Linn a 53-year-old
Buddhist Burmese man (an ex-convict) was captured at the scene and under severe
torture he had finally confessed. According to the police he stated that a
former inmate he used to know many years back in Mandalay’s Oboe Prison had
hired him to kill Ko Ni whom he claimed he doesn’t know as the infamous Muslim
leader. And the reward supposed to be was a brand new car.

He named his mastermind as Myint Swe
(alias) Aung Win Zaw a former army officer and an ex-convict with clandestine connections
to the DKBA (Democratic Karen Buddhist Army) extremely active in Both Mandalay
and Karen State and also on the lawless Thai-Burma border.

(CNN) Democrats are spending the
opening weeks of the Trump administration trying to flex their muscle any way
they can -- boycotting confirmation hearings, refusing to work with Republicans
on Obamacare and pondering a filibuster of President Donald Trump's Supreme
Court pick.

But as Democrats throw every procedural hurdle they can think of at
Trump, they're facing a bleak reality: they have virtually no power in
Washington. The party has no clear successor to Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton
who can speak with one voice for the party. And there is no consensus yet on a
strategy to thwart Trump's legislative agenda -- or even how to prioritize the
issues they plan to challenge him on.

There's one thing giving them comfort:
Trump himself. The President's initial actions in office have been so
breathtaking in their scope and breadth that frustrated Democrats say their
base is galvanized in ways they haven't seen in a long time. That could make it
easier for Democratic groups to gear up for a more forceful effort to sway the
balance of power in 2018 and 2020.

In November 2016, Swiss police arrested
the imam of the an'Nur mosque in Winterthur, in the canton of Zürich, for
calling for the murder of Muslims who refuse to participate in communal prayer.

The young imam, who had come from Ethiopia, had been in Switzerland for
only a short time. The Zurich Federation of Islamic Organizations (Vioz)
declared it was "shocked", and suspended the an'Nur mosque from the
federation until further notice: "We are shocked that an imam in one of
our houses of prayer called for violence."

There is little cause for
"shock". Already in 2015, Winterthur made headlines in Switzerland as
an emerging center for young Muslims with jihadi ambitions. Four people from
Winterthur managed to travel to Syria to join ISIS and a fifth was stopped at the
airport in Zürich.

In November 2015, Swiss journalist and
Syria expert, Kurt Pelda said, "The IS has a cell in Winterthur in the
vicinity of the An'Nur Mosque in Hegi, there is no longer any doubt." He
also said that in addition to the five known cases, another man from Winterthur
had travelled to Syria as well.

Thursday, February 2, 2017

Post praising U Ko Ni's alleged
assassin goes viral in Myanmar: A post praising Kyi Linn — the man now in
custody for the murder of the widely respected Muslim lawyer U Ko Ni — has
gained over 18,000 shares and over 36,000 reactions on Facebook since being
posted at around 10:30pm on Sunday night.

The post includes a photo of Kyi Linn shortly after his arrest. In the
caption accompanying the original post, Tin Ko Latt writes: Let’s honor U Kyi Linn from Mandalay who did
the work of a hero by risking his life for the whole country and killing that
scoundrel Nga Ni​. Fee free to disagree. According to the infamous Rohingya
Blogger and activist Ro Nay San Lwin, "Nga Ni" is a disrespectful
distortion of U Ko Ni's name.

Some of the 110 comments on the post
disapprove of Tin Ko Latt's message, and many of the shares condemn it as well.
One post from yesterday says: "The murderer is not a hero. This is the
work of an uneducated individual. The country cannot develop and religion
cannot flourish with these kinds of people, and will only get worse." However,
others certainly agree with Tin Ko Latt's praise for the suspected assassin.